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orionid, did you try a scan with the saran wrap bubbled up/crinkly? I was curious as to whether that would add any kind of a cool texture or effect to whatever’s being scanned (but not curious enough to have tried it myself, hence the question…)

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I don’t think anyone needs any ideas for this one (it was a fun one, eh?), but just in case here’s one that I liked but didn’t use, free for the taking. (I liked it but came up with others that didn’t require a trip to the store to execute.)

The idea is to take 4 different colors of cellophane, saran wrap, or as my wife suggested the clear covers they sell for kids’ book reports, and divide the glass of your scanner into quadrants. Lay a Campbell’s soup can in the center of each quadrant, et voila – your own personal Andy Warhol.

Since I didn’t actually try to execute it, the only problem I see is whether the cellophane would show up well enough. It may require holding the scanner cover over it to get a white reflection. (And whether the voters would like it was another question, but that’s not exactly specific to this idea ;))

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Elsinore, would you mind doing the OBO thing on FSM for Farktographer and I, please? TIA.

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I actually did see those earlier, although I think it was on another site. Could’ve been just a similar setup, though, but it was about capturing bats as they swoop down to drink. Pretty amazing shots, but it’d take quite a bit of setup, although as you say, minimal cost.

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Thanks everyone.

generally bats are insect eaters so …. got a lot of insects this year.

As far as I can tell though, the insect (mosquito in particular) population is much reduced this year (I’ve attributed it to the cold winter we had). Either way, they can have all of the mosquitos they want. My wife told one of her friends about the bats and she asked what we were going to do to get rid of them! I’m thinking I need to build them a house so they have somewhere to roost.

i probably wouldve gotten a bunch of shots with a half a bat in it

Notice my decent shot to total ratio (6/60)? Yeah, I got several half-bats or just blurs.

Looks like Eptesicus fuscus, otherwise known as the unimaginitively named “Big Brown Bat”.

Might be unimaginative, but it’s pretty spot-on. That’s one of the things that surprised me when I first looked at the photos – the size of some of them! They’re more like flying squirrels than the smaller ones I’m used to seeing.

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I don’t think there’s anything to apologize for Els; I’m amazed at your near-spotless record of diligence for the contests as it is.

Good luck with the camp! Ours (when I was still doing it) is around this time, too, and we were almost always guaranteed high heat and a decent chance of a thunderstorm. Good times, though.

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Yep, if it’s plugged in, it can and will be zapped by a strong enough surge. And lightning hitting anywhere near a powerline is going to be strong enough. Surges can also come in through the coax going to the cable modem or TV and the phone line going to a modem, DSL modem or phone. They make surge protectors for those as well. It’s questionable whether anything other than unplugging would help with a direct or near-direct hit, though.

On another note: Dangit! I just remembered a shot I took recently that would’ve been perfect for this contest. Too late now, so I’ll just have to leave it here as a B. So without further ado, I present: The Canoe Tree.

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rav, what images are you trying to enlarge and how big of a print are you trying to get? If these are images from your Rebel, you shouldn’t need any special software. I’ve had a 4 megapixel image (from a Powershot G2) enlarged to 20″x30″ and it looked fine (although that’s about the upper limit for that small resolution).

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I hope so. If so, I’ll have to quiz schnee on his scraping techniques, cause mine are pretty tightly coupled to certain HTML attributes that changed significantly. Worst case, I can feed him my data until he gets a chance to update his scraper.

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mopsy they re-designed the page layout and it went live today. Apparently, we’ll get over it.

There was a post yesterday with a preview link, which I fortunately saw; otherwise, my stats scraper would be crashing big-time tonight. Which leads me to wonder how FSM is going to handle the change…

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olavf, what’s the difference between that and the diopter adjustment disc on the camera? Does it exceed the limits of the on-camera adjustment?

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sleeping, I think that split image circle you mention is what my Nikkormat had. I checked out the link. It may be a possibility – have you tried it or know of anyone who has? The only problem is that unless I also got the installation service, it’d be a catch-22 situation – if I could see well enough to do the installation myself, I likely wouldn’t need the screen in the first place!

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I’m thinking about getting a reticule for my camera.

Is that reticle or reticule?

Either way, would you mind describing it a bit? If it’s a focusing aid, I might very well be interested as well. I don’t wear my glasses when shooting (I adjust the diopter), but with or without I have the same trouble with manual focusing that you and Zero have. I generally just use the autofocus and hope for the best but there are times when I’ve really wished I could manually focus reliably.

It seems to me that my old Nikkormat had a focusing mechanism that made it really easy to judge focus. But of course that was back when my eyes were 20/20 or better, too.

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I agree with chup – nice shots, especially Osgoode. And it’s good to know I’m not the only one who still does that kinda thing. Just a couple of weeks ago in Vegas, I went through the first couple of days with the WB manually set to flash. I don’t even recall doing that in the first place, but fortunately it’s easy enough to fix in post.

Oh, and that’s a neat idea in general – I’d like to get an open house for photography on several of the older buildings here.

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I wouldn’t be surprised to see it surpass 3000 votes by contest end.

Did I say 3000? How about 4000?!

That puts this contest at #3 ever in terms of total votes, bested only by the original and “Look to the Skies”.

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